


verklempt

by rivkahana (trailingviolets)



Category: The Book Thief (2013), The Book Thief - Markus Zusak
Genre: Dreams and Nightmares, Dreamsharing, F/M, Friendship/Love, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-06
Updated: 2019-01-06
Packaged: 2019-10-05 06:20:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17319605
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trailingviolets/pseuds/rivkahana
Summary: Liesel dreams of Max while writing her novel.





	verklempt

_Verklempt_.

The word is small in the corner of the basement, nearly painted over by Liesel’s angry hand. Halfway to Stuttgart, or gone, Max is ill-disposed to explain.

He leaves no one to ask except Hans, who shakes his head sadly in distraction.

“It’s Yiddish,” he says heavily. “Probably it wasn’t for us, private.”

Yet doubt finds Liesel second-guessing. Max loved words, far too much to leave one behind, inexplicable. What’s more is that she recognizes the gesture. Another tacit prayer of survival between them, bothered by the future in a rat’s hole of a hideaway.

_Liesel. If I leave...I won’t leave, unless it’s what’s best._

***

In January the Gestapo burn the textbooks, ripped from classroom shelves and women’s arms. Not only Liesel’s youth group but hundreds across Germany participate in a communal bonfire that rises to the sky in a bright, hellish glow. Like resurfaced bodies after a drowning, husks of spines gather in piles along the street corners, devoid of the secret lives led by their pages.

***

Max’s _verklempt_ stays silent, never giving up its truth. Enough vacancy colors the basement to leave its own dismayed verbiage, rattling around the walls.

On the cold, sinking mattress under the steps, through another dreamy summer of starvation, Liesel waits. The days drag long, inviting dreams of fists and daylight to come jostling through the bed.

Instead, there are whispered stars snatched from an ash and chalk sky, sore lungs and apologies. There are also dark creatures who yell _Juden!_ with voices that ache like broken teeth in her jaw.

At the worst times, the world dims to a single suffocating candle, flickering strong enough for Liesel to watch, mesmerized, as the air around it grows dark.

***

The pity of the future is how time constantly looks back on itself, until at some moment the past is no longer real. Fearing that all memory of Max will one day cease, Liesel hides his likeness away, and pretends to forget.

***

Miracles are most needed at concentration camps and the gravesites of brothers, not in the rubble of Himmel Street. Liesel tells herself that she is owed miracles beyond imagination, and one day they will come. Just not over the body of the lemon-haired boy, or her father, safe at last in death.

***

As the years pass, _verklempt_ becomes a luxury of dwindling hope, too precious to think of. In this way Liesel suffers alone, divorced even from the comfort of grief.

Finally, by the faint light of a peace spent behind black curtains, she skims her mind and takes stock. Of firesides, of hair like feathers. Of skeleton eyes inked in guilt and the red thread of love that snapped long ago.

Half-written by the same grey dawn light is the story of it all, not so different from a German fairytale. All other joy tastes bitter, compared to words. For on the page, Max walks on tightropes and tree limbs, and may still perform the magic of coming home.

***

In nightmares Liesel fights against the unfairness of it all, rattling the bed where she sleeps. From within her, the truth of _verklempt_ sulks pitiless and finite. For these dreams are troubling only in their reality.

It begins with Max’s messy workspace. Paint cans hunch dimly over a dropcloth, old sheets scored with the dotted likeness of a rising sun. Hanging by a clothesline of twine are the battered pages of _Mein Kampf_ , drying and stained as Liesel never saw. Her longing for home spreads like a synthetic death, in tears that feel like wads of cotton on her cheeks.

“I’m not done yet.” Max stands in the corner, a half-furtive shadow, pointing at the fluttering pages. A flit of true likeness passes between them at the eyes. Liesel feels heartbroken and unmoored, frozen like something broken in the snow.

“Train, dreams, fists,” she reads, from a page left on the desk. It’s as if the words themselves are poised, waiting to exhale from the journey of wherever running will take them. “What's this a list of?”

“Ways to escape,” he says, already retreating into dust. Liesel tightens towards the grim comfort that now she’s opened herself, the dream will return.

***

 _Verklempt_. The habit of waking and immediately searching for him in the next bed. Caught dreaming with his eyes open, as Liesel often was by Rosa, Max seemed almost whole.

“What are you thinking of?” Just to ask, to prolong the rest of the daylight racing in.

“Coffee,” he’d say. Or, maybe, “Spring.”

***

“What about dreams?” she asks Alex one morning. Liesel and her boss have many unproductive days. Often they wander from the shop halfway through a commission to stare at the sun, baffled and silent. “What do they mean?”

“What kind of dreams?” he asks. Alex likes to talk, when given a topic, a gift that is unexpected and contagious to Liesel.

“The kind that are very real, like messages.” Alex deliberates with eyes lost somewhere straight ahead.

“To me that means there’s unfinished business.” Liesel imagines the word _verklempt_ in a conspicuous air-balloon over her head, and glances away sharply. In the street, someone’s alive with laughter, saying _stop that!_ to their friend in pleasure.

They work until sundown on endless suits.

***

Now she willingly descends the telltale steps to the basement, knowing that what waits at the bottom is no nightmare. For what monster ever saw themselves as so, or spent a life in penance?

_If I don’t go now, there won’t be enough food for winter._

***

Under the spell of a nightmare, Max’s face often shook. He said he felt the physical strain of a thousand German feet in his sleep. He told Liesel that it was painful, in a bed piled with talisman and seeded by tears. She remembers every word spoken, the waking exchange of _tell me who was standing over you?_ and the sharp loyalty in his eyes.

How Max’s throat jumped when he said, “you were.” By the hush of a darkened bedroom years in the future, a single word falls from Liesel’s mouth to the floor. _Verklempt._

***

In time, Liesel is able to write more, connecting parts of a fractal self drawn closer by desperation. She hopes the truth will shine through, despite all the avenues it takes.

The pain is in telling a story that makes sense, when war never bothers to. Many times Liesel slams fist-first to the carpet, shrieking. She curses a prolific storm, crying in pitiful, monotoned Yiddish, for how the words never go away, except when you need them.

“I’m sorry,” she says to Ilsa, stumbling to retreat from her writing desk.

“You sounded in pain.” Her friend speaks slowly. Liesel regrets the odd hours of nightmarers and writers, for it is taxing sanity from them both. “What does it mean?”

“ _Verklempt_?” Liesel asks carefully. The quiet house is no comfort, damning in its luxury but empty of the dead.

Ilsa understands, though not completely.

“It means, I’ll tell you when you’re older.”

***

 _War is a bitterness that should never be glorified by stories of friendship_.

Liesel’s first account is dark, set in a tone distrusting of the world and deeply embittered. It’s the truth Liesel knows, that life is too quick to sic death on the heels of love, and that being human is ultimately pointless.

 _So get your hope somewhere else_ , she writes.

***

In the basement, Max flips to the end of the draft. Head against his shoulder, Liesel waits. His handwriting appears after the last line. _Try again._

“What happens to me?” he asks, in an expectant ache of a posture centered towards her. Liesel wavers. It takes more than she can offer of strength, the telling.

“Your body was dredged at Dachau,” she says. “It was just bones, _you were just bones,_ but the examiner said your teeth...you had broken teeth from fistfighting.”

The Jew regards her. Liesel imagines Sisyphus, if his only sin was to be in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

“It’s you exterminated me,” he says at last. “Not Hitler. Not Dachau.”

“Max,” she says. “It’s not done. For me you can’t die, but the story...” he moves out of reach of her arms, wounded. “I tried to write a happy ending, but there’s none.”

Max sighs. “Try to see clearer, past how you think it ends." 

When she wakes, Liesel starts over. It takes all night.

***

“What now?” Alex listens as a distraction, with an ear to the front of the shop.

“They burned the registry.”

“Yes.”

“Some of the bodies were unaccounted for. The records were wrong. People lived, went back to their families. The Americans just let them go, they didn’t understand. Do you think?” she stops.

“No one’s ever gone,” Alex says, for this is what he believes. Liesel doesn’t dare disagree. For what else was she asking to hear?

***

Liesel stands glumly over the waning May roses, for they’re the last in Molching. Outside of the dream, it’s July.

“Should I leave?” she asks Max, beside her.

In life they were hazarded together by parents who bet achingly wrong. Yet there is fate left in the notion of borrowed time, and in the hope of a new start.

“The better question is, where will you go?” Unable to lay siege on the future or suffer by it, Max shouldn’t care. She wrote, _he’s somewhere caring what happens to me, and so he can’t be dead,_ and it’s never felt more right.

“Sydney?” Liesel holds one of the roses to her cheek, quietly wishing. She thinks of the gleaming Harbour Bridge in headlines, the weeks after the war when the newspapers returned to print. It was alarming how fast the glittering sea jumped to beckon Liesel, forestalling in the way of an unattainable joy, yet oddly familiar.

That night she returns to her desk, the novel black and red and almost written.

***

A candle is secreted like a book in her closed palm. Like Rosa’s rolling pin, it’s been repurposed from the kitchen for a clandestine future. Liesel remembers stealing books from the mayor, and grins.

IIsa sits up at the sound of the door. “Where you’re going, that won’t cut it,” she says, gesturing to the half-wax excuse in Liesel’s hand. “Come.”

Liesel stands before the mansion’s locked safe, pretending she hasn’t often peered inside. After a moment of blind fumbling, Ilsa produces from the darkness a small glass relic the size of a matchbook.

“Is this for him?” she asks.

The question is prodding but it’s also _Rosa_ , and Liesel will never outlive the relief of a world full of mothers.

“He never even saw Molching during the day,” she says. "It's for me."

***

Hours later, Liesel trudges across the Amper with cut red hands wrapped in a sodden tablecloth. When she approaches Ilsa, it’s in defeat.

“The temple,” Liesel says, breathless, as they stand over the sink, her elbows dripping into the basin. “Even the dishes were smashed, why?”

***

“You’ve been at this forever,” he says. “and it’s not getting easier.”

“You’re a pain,” Liesel hisses. His words call for a powerful, Rosa-quality cuss. Only out of respect is she able to resist.

“I’m right.”

“It’s a novel, not the laundry,” she reminds him. “It makes its own schedule.”

“You’ve been carrying this around in your head, finished, for years. Just try putting it down.”

“One word,” she says. “You left me with _verklempt_ and expect Shakespeare.” Yet she’s no longer ready to give up, and continues writing.

***

Over the years, Liesel's grief softens. At last the misery is carted off with the words, by thieves and garbage men alike, come to collect all the paper she’s wasted.

Her first attempt at a novel was asinine and borderline dispirited, as shambolic as Liesel felt standing on the toes of a borrowed story. Only with time did the truth materialize, in jokes retrieved from the nether and pauses chalked with fear. All that’s left to commit is the epilogue.

Liesel no longer wonders when the world will lose its love of sabotage. Instead, she writes about the peace that comes after.

***

When she leaves the shop, Liesel kisses Alex twice goodbye. It’s a habit she learned from the Steiner girls, standing on her stoop, itching with impatience and cold feet that wanted to run.

The future that might have arisen is hazy between them, twisted many different ways on a horizon of endless disappointments, but what remains is the power of friendship. In dearth of Rudy, there is love left in making do, and in remembrance.

***

“What about rescuing the accordion?” Max is written back into the story, finally whole, only wanting to know what comes next.

Liesel laughs. “I wrote everything. Except the part about waking up next to you, with _The Standover Man_ in my lap.”

“Ah,” he says, tapping her on the shoulder. “Discretion is the better part of valor.”

“It is,” she says. “But I can’t help tacking on in my head that I wanted you, then.”

“Did you always?”

“That wasn’t the first time,” Liesel is suspicious of ever being so young, with a concrete pour of levity in her heart. “I just didn’t know how.”

“We kissed once,” he says, “but you didn’t write that.”

“That was the easiest secret to keep. It'll always be ours, because there were no words.” Max takes her hand, cherishing it against the unchanging Yiddish in the corner of the wall. Their final togetherness is a promise and a punch.

Liesel has not set foot in the basement for seven years.

"I'm still sharing that moment with you. Every time you think of it, I'm there."

Her eyes fall to the spent novel, splayed on the dropcloth that is the color of a painter’s cotton sky.

“A decade of failure,” she says, “and I couldn’t bring you home.”

“It’s okay,” Max says. His fingers grip tighter over Liesel’s. “Just think of me."

This is the last time, she knows. It’s been the last time for so long.

“I will,” she says. “As part of everything, and beautiful.” 

***

She struggles to hide the joy of being an author. Every day she thinks maybe Alex will ask if the novel’s hers.

Business has steadied, with so many American-style weddings that take place in the spring, on the river. Her eyes ache from the lunatic stridency of white dresses.

Sympathetic and red-faced with the heat, Liesel stands to help.

"Want me to take it?" she asks. "I'll make space this afternoon."

“No, it's someone for you, personal.” When she looks up, his expression is already arranged into a careful apology.

“It's okay, I'll talk to him."

Since the second printing of the novel, her agent at the clearing house has sent unsolicited messengers in all forms of disarray. Often they come bearing statements that make her eyes water.

“Sir?” she says at last, moving to the front of the shop. The man’s turned back is small against the window. Perhaps he’s come from Berlin.

***

Though Liesel fails to recognize Max’s face, clean-shaved and alight, her eyes know. _It’s really you_ she says, and he nods, stricken, admitting _of course._

She thinks death must have backed away, in search of a less stubborn soul.

***

Alex steps over the German and the Jew on the floor. They will always be a little frantic, he thinks, for nothing can replace such relief.

Gingerly, he changes the sign in the window to show that they’re closed. There’s a touch of hysteria in Liesel’s voice when she asks, _my god you read it?_ of the grinning, crying ghost, as if after all she’s still shy of The Book Thief. 

***

“Don’t gorge him.” Ilsa stills Liesel’s hand over the sink. In it is a plate patterned with dancing pink roses. Indignant, she jerks her arm away. _Mama checked my pockets when I went downstairs!_ she imagines shouting, just for the sake of it.

Yet therein is the beauty of writing a book that means everything, for what needs explaining has already conveniently been said, and well.

“I’m sorry,” Ilsa admits later, an apology to Liesel’s back. “He does look a bit like a bird, you know.”

***

Alone in their bedroom, Max laughs until his throat quakes. “Her too,” he says of the comment.

“I promise I didn’t say a thing about it to anyone.”

“You wrote it,” he says. Underneath all the feathers, his eyes are inky warm. “And you were right.”

***

The mayor’s apple trees fret in the wind over Liesel’s head. More of Rudy lingers here, in the warm summer rain, than at all the graves in Munich. Without fail he finds her at his happiest, a lemon-haired boy tangled in branches.

“When it happened, he was smiling,” she says. Beside her, Max is a likeness of the love she once knew, listening intently over a pile of fruit.

Different yet the same, their friendship has only grown. She is able to know more of Max now, as he returns cautiously to who he once was, blinking in the sunlight and nearly free.

“Most of them do,” he says. “I stopped being afraid. At the end I thought it would just be a shame, not to see you again.”

“We should go to Sydney,” she says later, unfolding a linen that drapes over chairs and onto the floor. She’s already told Ilsa, she wants a tightrope to the sun on her wall. 

“Okay,” Max says, his hands covered in cerulean blue.

***

On their last afternoon in Germany, Liesel leads her friend over the Amper.

Inside the synagogue, she points to a line of twine that shifts from above the bimah, blown by the wind. From it hangs a flickering, guttering lantern.

“Rosa said that I should wait for you with a light in the window, after the war, because blackouts are cruel and people get lost in the dark.”

The broken rafters of the shul cast sun and shadow on Max’s face. Liesel thinks momentarily of the dreams.

“She was more worried about us than herself,” he says. “It's a good way to be remembered."

He’s talking about Rosa's legacy, but also his own, and the light at the end of the road.

***

They settle in the last pew, amongst the blown-in leaves. Slowly, as the sun sets, Liesel relates the agony of writing a novel, and how stories can steal the souls of the ones carrying them. Nothing remains to be said in the end, and they leave drained of conversation.

For after all, she knows that _verklempt_ has a soul, and needs no explanation.

***

“So?” she asks. Max combs his fingers again through her frayed braid. He stares at the choppy water, waiting for inspiration. In the distance the harbour bridge glitters in a heat Liesel knows only from imagination.

“It’s when you’re so overcome with emotion, good or bad, that you can’t speak.”

“Was I supposed to know?” He smiles.

“Well, I figured you would find out, one way or another.”

***

_FIN_

**Author's Note:**

> ***note:
> 
> If you are in the market to feel stomped-on, know that Max was once written out. In what is likely a contrary spirit, I have always envisioned Liesel and Max together. It seemed heartbreakingly foolish of Liesel not to choose him, because Max is one of the kindest, most vulnerable characters I know. Only once I left for college did it become clear to me the reasons against such a match. 
> 
> I realized the best possible future for Liesel would be in a clean, swift parting from the events of Himmel Street. This reiterated itself in the absolute refusal of the characters to fall in love, though I begged, cajoled, and cried for them to, hour after hour. For god’s sake, I thought, make each other happy! Now’s your chance!
> 
> Yet a stubborn truth of writing is that you start with inspiration, for no other purpose than to arrive at the end robbed of that spark. Your soul and emotions are trashed beyond compare and you find yourself staring at your reflection thinking, have we met? 
> 
> Out of respect for this weary process, there are allusions to the writing process that Zusak was too modest to make. Mentioned are bridges, Sydney, seven years of false starts, writing Max out, and a book that means everything. I benefited more from the comfort of three fouls than the homely advice of anyone else. This is my singular confession that the word shambolic was borrowed, and that I wrote this entirely without a copy by my side. 
> 
> (It’s worth noting that the original Book Thief I received in December of 2007 looks like it sailed through a few open windows, and it did. I’m still not over Rudy.)
> 
> The Book Thief works because it eskews propaganda. Zusak never promises an Austen-esque proposal as the prize for the gratuitous loss of the Holocaust. Instead, the novel keeps to the yearning realities that choke us up; how people, cities, and dreams are never made to last. How the world is red and black, dark and light, and that if we love enough, our ambiguities are clear.


End file.
